


my least favorite life

by oceansinmychest



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bathtime Sadness (lmao), Bathtubs, Character Study, Complicated Relationships, Drinking, Drinking to Cope, Dysfunctional Family, Dysfunctional Relationships, Family Issues, Gen, Hero Worship, Introspection, Pop Culture, Substance Abuse, Swearing, Trauma, prose
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-11
Updated: 2020-02-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:54:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22659670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oceansinmychest/pseuds/oceansinmychest
Summary: Beth Smith-Sanchez reflects on her sad, lonely life.Every day repeats itself: she saves a life, only to take away a little of her own. With great genius comes great suffering.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	my least favorite life

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from Lera Lynn's "My Least Favorite Life" which heavily inspired this fic.
> 
> By far, Beth Smith is my favorite character from the series and I wanted to probe her character by writing this fic. The writing may contain triggering content; all relevant themes are mentioned in the "additional tags" section. 
> 
> There is a reference to animal abuse when Beth was a child which is a reference to the episode, "The ABC's of Beth." Please note that I DO NOT condone animal abuse in any way, shape, or form!

> _This is my least favorite life_
> 
> _The one where I am out of my mind_
> 
> _The one where you are just out of reach_
> 
> _The one where I stay and you fly_

Every day repeats itself: she saves a life, only to take away a little of her own.

With great genius comes great suffering.

Beth Smith (née Sanchez) is more than the horse girl, the disenchanted wife, the aloof mom; she’s the smartest woman in the goddamn universe. She ought to feel grateful: she has a beautiful family, she’s a successful doctor. Somehow, she feels unfulfilled. Night after night (and sometimes, afternoons), she reaches for the bottle. So, why does she lead an unhappy life stretching across the expansive multiverse?

Only the Riddle Sphinx knows.

Temporary gratification in a single gulp allows Beth to feel so consumed by a loss meant to be manageable. She can’t quell biological imperatives, the illogical anxieties that eat away at her same as the alcohol fermenting her liver.

Now isn’t the time to get lost on the way to the grocery store, sipping a miniature bottle from a crumpled brown bag; better to make a mess at home. Vice aplenty promises no resolution.

Discarded boxes of Franzia lay in crumpled heaps while empty bottles of wine roll across the kitchen’s linoleum. Drinking never kills the pain, only numbs her around the edges, not quite nullifying her dissatisfaction to pacify herself. Her too-cold fingers grip the stem of her glass. White-knuckled, her glassy eyes study the red sea sloshing about. Her wine swirls round and round. Sometimes, she related her life to a dead goldfish spinning down the toilet.

Giving into consumption, she can go through a liter and a half bottle a night without any issue. Her head rolls back, her gaze meeting the window; she thinks about the fever that runs through her. The booze is to blame, her sickness easily diagnosed by clinical terms. None of the stars in the sky can placate her, not even Zeta Reticuli in the pitch-black blanket of the terrifying unknown.

Seated cross-legged on the floor with her back to the cabinets, Beth likens herself to a stranger in her own skin. She’s a self-fulfilling prophecy at best entertaining a multitude of realities though she has the misfortune of being caught in yet another simulacrum. Somewhere along the way, Beth lost the bright-eyed girl she used to be. 

Why did she bother marrying Jerry? They’re polar opposites; his incompetence and lackadaisical approach to worldly affairs enrages her. Lost soul that she is, she should have kept her name, some part of her old self.

Jerry couldn’t fill the gnawing ache, her children couldn’t fill the void; her wants and ambitions starve so she marinates herself in misery. Staggering, struggling to stand, Dad’s apathy courses through her veins.

Incapable of casting aside her expectations, Beth finds solace in bittersweet deflection. Stumbling, she opens the fridge, the cabinets, in search for a means to curb her appetite. Should she take a number in Dad’s book and indulge in liquor? Hennessy conjures up too many memories of her waspish youth, vomiting in shrubbery and bed-bound for the next day.

She finds another bottle of cabernet hidden behind a stack of dishes. She doesn’t question its placement or the reason behind the madness. With a fluid movement aided by the corkscrew, she pops it open and savors the pungent aroma – the swill of grape and blackberry they sell you in those shitty marketing schemes.

There is a detrimental, unspoken sorrow written in her bones. The inexplicable, unexplained loss of her mother sent her off the rails as a kid. Perhaps she is the ghost of her mother, as all daughters are wont to be.

She seldom knows the sensation of a quiet home. Tonight is an exception to the rule. Jerry cowers in his shitty new apartment. Summer sleeps over a friend’s house. Morty and Rick gallivant on some absurd adventure. She acknowledges how he always leaves in the end. The cycle continues. All she needed was a father who never left, a mother that cared for her.

To be this empty runs in the family.

She leans against the counter, refusing to fall down again. The bruises on her legs take ages to fade.

What kills her drive, but doesn’t sequester her desperate urge to flee?

She drinks until the silence is disturbed by the blood pounding against her eardrums.

Having assimilated to newly-minted divorcee status, Jerry – despite being a spineless worm – remains a permanent fixture of the Smith home. He visits with measly excuses: picking up a shirt that’s been neglected in the closet for four years; a notebook half-filled with pathetic ideas that would never be patented.

Damn, where was her Goblin King to whisk her away?

If only she were the maternal archetype, packing her kids sandwiches for lunch, entombed in a paper-bag, but here she is, sleepwalking through existence. Instead, she possesses a knack for burying herself in her work with the breadwinner excuse. Beth feels the familiar burn coursing down her throat, a wildfire that singed everyone in its consequential path.

The future anticipates a liver working overtime. Would Summer and Morty come to her aid when she’s old and grey, kicked back on an overstuffed recliner during her supposed golden years?

Insecurities galore, Morty’s the quaking antithesis of what Beth could have been. Her son goes missing for long periods of time. She doesn’t question his absence. She’s grown accustomed to loss. Instead, she projecting her desires for escapism onto Summer’s newly found independence; self-reliant and so self-assured for a girl her age.

Another sip tickles her throat. Eyes glazed over, she nearly splutters and coughs. More is never enough. It goes down the wrong way, but it’s a pleasant hurt. A kinder one that dissolves in due time.

Don’t blame her for plucking the wings off a butterfly at seven years old. With a clinical fascination, she’s doused mangled roadkill in kerosene at age ten. Tilted her head as she watched the flames eat away at fur and decay. It’s easier to cut into bodies, to lose herself to the precise stroke of the scalpel. It’s the only time she has a steady hand.

“I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor,” she tells herself. Slurs the conviction aloud. She has a medical degree, after all. _A heart surgeon,_ she revises her statement. _A horse surgeon,_ the world reminds her. Arrogance laden with insecurity knows no bounds.

She **is** and _she_ isn’t responsible for Tommy. Looked after and cared for like some cheap plaything. The envy she felt towards her childhood friend simmered into a state of forgetfulness over the years. Maybe she’s evil, maybe Rick isn’t a bad father, maybe it’s all her fault.

For Christ’s sake, her father’s the man who sold the world. Her mistake involves deifying others. As the embodiment of a mad scientist trope, he reeks of stale liquor, boredom, vomit, and scientific tinkering fit to the mold of a God Complex. Still, you beg him to stay and always doubt the moment he leaves. He’s a homicidal maniac and fuck, so is _she_. The apple never falls far from the tree.

Truth be told, she envied his freedom, his independence, his drive to get-the-fuck-away from everything – her father, the nihilistic, amoralistic anti-hero. Her father Fantômas is a phantasmal mass who has carried weight and presence for the entirety of her sad life.

Dad’s naught but a drunken hack. He always wants to rest his eyes; hell, so does she. Still, Beth is oh so eager to have a drink with dear, old Pops on the couch with its too-stiff springs and the multi-dimensional commercials that make her snort with laughter as her Dad spares her a glance, bemused by her antics.

Accustomed to a broken heart, the burn in her chest is a welcome distraction. Therapy simply isn’t worthwhile. If only she didn’t make her problems other people’s problems. Burying trauma only works until it doesn’t. She bats away a tear from the corner of her eye with a curled finger.

Overwhelmed by the magnitude of infinite realities and infinite timelines, thoughts run rampant through her overactive mind. With her perception skewed as just a girl searching for her lost (& found!) father, she covets theory yet loathes speculation. Perhaps she really _is_ him. Through his presence, her trauma remains fresh and spilling over, an open wound that hasn’t felt the desperate pressure to stop the bleeding.

Bogged down by Quantum Theory (entanglement had been her favorite), she ought to fear radioactive decay. Her null and void world revolves around Rick Sanchez in fear and loathing of the day he’ll leave again.

How many lives, how many realities, has her father lived? How many tears, how many years, has she wasted? To say she’s envious is a skewed understatement. She’s imagined countless lives for herself. Constantly, the future stretches beyond her pining reach.

Alas, she doesn’t get out enough.

She leaves the kitchen behind in a state of disarray. Her loose, grey socks shuffle along.

In the den, her shin meets the sofa. On the verge of becoming unhinged, Beth slurs a curse, inarticulate. Vincent Price in _The Last Man on Earth_ flickers on the tele. Although she has an affinity for cult classics, all the lines fall flat. Unable to focus on the black and white images, she shuts it off. Drops the remote and listens to the loud clack as it makes its merciless plummet.

The home is a diabolical device. Just ask Erwin Schrödinger.

Vision swimming as she cruises along the Möbius strip of this maddening house, she nearly heads to bed. The stairs creak beneath her weighted step. Dyed blonde locks are held together by the gnawing black hair clip that she finds in the medicine cabinet. With a loose hairband, she manages to pile up golden strands into a messy, lopsided bun.

Caught in a drunken, surrealist whirl, self-control is tossed aside in favor of self-medication. A little codeine takes her off the edge. She washes the pill down with a hearty gulp. It’s the last of her glass. She left the open remains on the counter; it’s tomorrow’s Last Supper.

What about the consequences? The fatality of the situation yields an incomplete theory.

With trembling fingers, she runs herself a bath. Water streamlines to flood the porcelain basin. Her lighter slips within her trembling grip. She burns herself while drunkenly attempting to light a candle. Pauses a minute to examine her ugly, reddened fingertip. Wax drips as deep as blood; she observes with objective fascination. After such a brazen protest, the wick catches flame. It always amazes Beth how glass heats and burns flesh. In vain, the wick eats away while the flame trickles down.

An attempt to relax sends her out of her mind. That’s the way Jerry used to frame it.

Perfectionism holds Beth hostage. She sheds herself of her second skin, her worn mask, peeling off the red polo, the blue jeans, and refusing to make eyes with the ghost in the mirror. There exists the temptation to leave this life behind. To squash and squander all expectation. The tender, wounded ego continues to fall apart at the seams.

Wordlessly, she eases herself into the water that threatens to scald her. Her buzz soothes the impending pain, compartmentalized until tomorrow.

Soap suds trickle down her belly afflicted by the soft stretch marks of childbirth, barely visible. Her elbow rests on the ledge. The sluggish tide of sleepiness threatens to pull her under. Her eyelids grow heavy. If she isn’t careful in keeping her head above the water, she could drown. Floating along some River Styx, she neglects the minutiae. On the verge of delirium, she is quick to blame the influence of others. She sinks like a stone in the tub, opening her mouth, refusing to scream out. A bubble flutters to the surface.

_Maybe he doesn’t love me, maybe Jerry doesn’t want me, maybe my kids hate me, maybe he’s never coming back, maybe-_

Where’s her metamorphosis?

The waves and ripples of denial crash over her pale, scrubbed raw body. The water’s scorching and fails to be the baptism she desperately needs. She’s never been one for faith. With a gasp and a gurgle, Beth rises to the surface. Defeated, she wraps the grey towel around herself like some saint banished to exile.

Deep in the denial of the Uncanny Valley, chaos and distortion suddenly never felt so certain. In a perpetual hangover, streams of mascara stain her cheeks. An empty stare greets her through the clear streaks on the steamed-up mirror.

Venturing further down the rabbit hole, her world becomes a tad foggy around the edges. Grogginess will accompany the morning fog to cloud her mind. Unable to walk in a straight line, she saunters into her bedroom. Throws on an over-sized t-shirt and calls it quits. She hides beneath the sheets, hides beneath another layer until the cycle resumes. The neglected collections of Kafka shoved under the queen-sized bed collect dust.

Nothing cures loneliness.

Another day, another bender. She’ll feel the sting and sour taste tomorrow. She always does.


End file.
